Security Reading Group @ UVa

Spring 2010 Schedule

2010-02-19T07:42:00.000-08:00

Security Reading Group is every other Monday at 330pm in Ollson 236D. The discussion leaders for the reading group this semester are as follows:

Feb 15: Yan Huang
Mar 1: Minh Le
Mar 15: Yuchen
Mar 29: Jeff S.
Apr 12: Peter S.
Apri 26: Kate M.

How to Join

2010-01-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

You are always welcome to participate in our discussion of interesting security problems, either physically (showing up at the bi-weekly meetings in 2010 Spring semester) or on-line at this blog-site. If you want to subscribe to our mail list, here is the link: http://groups.google.com/group/uva-cs-sec?hl=en.

Schedules

2009-05-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

Date	Topic	Presenter
Apr 27	Efficient Montgomery Multiplication on GPUs	David Noble
Mar 30	Web-key: Mashing with Permission	Yan Huang
Mar 9	Towards Practical Privacy for Genomic Computation	Chi-Hao Shen
Feb 23	vTPM: Virtualizing the Trusted Platform Module	Jeffrey Shirley
Feb 16	Privacy and Security in Library RFID: Issues, Practices, and Architectures	Yu Yao
Feb 9	OMash: Enabling Secure Web Mashups via Object Abstractions	Yan Huang

Get Familiar With All Those Research Conferences (CS)

2008-07-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

To save your time with google, here is some links about the reputation of conferences in computer science. Anyway, as is always declared on every individual web page below, ranking the conferences is a subjective task, and they can only be used as a reference.

Computer Science Conference Ranking -- maintained by a dedicated organization
http://cs.conference-ranking.net/index.html -- there are many useful links to other ranking sources on this page.
Computer Science Conference Rankings -- maintained by Dr. Sourav S Bhowmick in NTU, Singapore
Computer Science Conference Rankings -- maintained by Ashwin Satyanarayana, a graduate student in SUNY Albany, US

07-16-2008 Seminar

2008-07-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

Are you still able to remember all the elements of speculative execution, which you've learned in an architecture class way back in your college? Do you know there is a close relationship between this performance enhancement technique and an effective security insurance mechanism, such that we can shoot two birds with one stone?

If you feel a little bit confused, we are gathering in the default time, default room on Wednesday to dissolve your confusion. Yan is going to introduce an efficient dynamic taint analysis implementation that leverage hardware speculation support. The paper can be obtained from here.

As always, free lunch will be offered. Many thanks to Jeff for bringing the Indian food from Milan.

06-26-2008 Seminar

2008-06-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

Solicitation

Have you ever used any voice over IP service from companies such as Skype, Vonage, Yahoo? Recent years has witnessed a tremendous surge on this cool technology. However, despite their low charge (sometimes even free), do you know there are lots of security concerns associated with this business? Yes, the media has already given the public concern some coverage, for example, NewScientist had this article.

On the coming Thursday (06-26) Paul and Rachel are leading a discussion focusing on a potential tapping technique on VOIP and possible countermeasures. It is a latest Security and Privacy paper, which is available from this link.

The seminar is open to anyone who is interested in the topic. As always, free lunch (French bread, cakes, donuts, and tomatoes) will be provided.

The presentation slides are available from here. (You need OpenOffice to open the file.)

06-12-2008 Seminar

2008-06-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

The paper discussed was the Patagonix paper from USENIX Security Symposium 2008. This is a interesting work about using virtualization technique to detect stealthy rootkits. The paper is available from this here .

The slides used in the discussion is available from here.

General Information

2008-06-21T20:21:00.000-07:00

Suggested Schedule

Normally, we are focused on one recent conference paper, along with necessary background information from relevant papers, per meeting.
The suggested time allocation for each seminar is given below. But if necessary, you, as the presenter, can lead the discussion according to your own time schedule.
12:30~12:45 Lunch
12:45~12:05 Presentation
12:05~13:45 Discussion

Suggested Sources of Papers

Feel free to select a paper of your interested research topics. But make sure it somehow raises security concerns in computing.

For those who are searching interesting papers, here is a list of top conferences on computer security.
Security & Privacy
CCS
NDSS
USENIX Security Symposium
Crypto
EuroCrypto

Schedules in the Summer '08

2008-06-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

During this summer term, the security reading group is going to meet regularly once every two weeks, that is, on Thursday 12:30 at room 228E. In case there is an exception so that we cannot make it in room 228E, I will surely send a notification about the temporary location to the mailing list. So scheduled dates are,
Jun. 12, 26
Jul. 10, 24
Aug. 7, 21

Volunteers for presentations are always welcome. Please contact me (yh8h at cs virginia edu) if you want to sign up for a talk.

You are also welcome to present your own work. If you feel like a practise conference talk but are not so comfortable about the regular meeting time, we can work out special meeting time for you.

Most Important Fact: Lunch will be offered before the discussion for free!